


where floor meets ceiling and all the space in between

by bebitched



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Home Building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-21
Updated: 2013-02-21
Packaged: 2017-12-03 04:11:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bebitched/pseuds/bebitched
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>jim, pam and their fixer-upper house. </p>
<p>he can almost see her now, hair graying at her temples, decades of laugh-lines softening the edges of her eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where floor meets ceiling and all the space in between

  
_yours is the first face that i saw; i think i was blind before i met you_  
  
The sunlight creeps across the sidewalk, warming the cool concrete and lighting up the sky.   
  
He can see his breath in the air; it clouds up the glass panel on the new screen door he’s installing, the exertion of holding up the heavy weight with one hand flushing his otherwise chilled skin. He stretches up to twist a screw in place with one of his dad’s old rusty screwdrivers, the red power dusting his hands, mixing with the sweat in the crease of his palms to look like blood. He toes the edge of the stoop with his bare feet; when he’d first woken up this morning with a jolt of handy-work ambition he hadn’t had the planning down to put on shoes first. Just a rush of _fix house now_.   
  
Jim supposes if women have the instinct to nest, men have the instinct to repair. To better. To make theirs in the only way they know how. He’s never felt more like his father than in this moment, minus the cigar smoke and radiator-laugh. Saturday mornings spent wood-working in the garage; walking into the kitchen to find an over-turned chair in his lap, reattaching the leg; bent over the toaster trying to determine its ailment.   
  
He feels the warmed press of enamel against his forearm, and he looks over to find Pam nudging a mug of coffee at him. Smiling to hear the satisfying clink of her engagement ring against the material, he takes it gratefully, wiping his red palms off on his thinned, plaid sleeping pants. He can almost see her now, hair graying at her temples, decades of laugh-lines softening the edges of her eyes. A marriage lived well in this house, like his parents before him and maybe their children after them. She sits on the front stoop, sipping her coffee as they watch the sun rise in silence.   
  
It’s a good feeling.   
  
  
  
_love is a fragile word in the air on the length we lay_  
  
  
Jim lays his fingers softly against the carpet, noticing the way the fibers shift to leave the pattern of his hand there even after it’s gone. Pam wiggles her hips on the carpet beside him. They’d replaced the red shag carpet earlier that day with something lighter, more modern, and he can’t say he misses it.   
  
They both stare upwards into the tangle of branches, enraptured by the twinkle of Christmas lights illuminating little bubble-shaped pockets of pine needles, tinted red and blue and green and yellow. The ornaments sparkle with gold and silver glitter, twirling slightly in an imaginary breeze. Jim smiles, remembering when they’d first put up the tree earlier that night.   
  
The branches had stuck out at odd angles and the star on top was tipped to the side and they didn’t have enough ornaments… and Pam was smiling. Grinning, actually, like a Cheshire cat who just caught the acid-trip canary.   
  
“What are you smiling about?” He’d asked softly, already smirking in anticipation of her answer as his anxiety melted.   
  
Her eyes had roved to his and that smile was still there, deepened even.   
  
“It’s just… it’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” Jim glanced at the tree again and through her eyes he could see it, the beauty in imperfection. _Their_ imperfection. All theirs.   
  
Under the tree, his hand finds hers, tangling their fingers together. Somewhere, there’s a foot of snow and work and ice to top it off, but right then there’s only a warm little living room and twinkling lights.   
  
  
  
_i am giving up on half empty glassess and i am giving up on greener grasses_   
  
  
“Now a little to the left… left, Pam, left. Ow!” his injured appendage flexes against the upholstery, “Yep. That was my thumb.”   
  
“Oh! Sorry.” Pam’s disembodied apology comes from behind the backrest of the chair as they scoot (slowly but surely) out the front door and onto the lawn. Luckily Jim’s bad luck ends at the door; there are no incidents walking backwards down the front steps.   
  
They both set the piece of furniture down simultaneously, and he lets out a heavy breath into the warming, spring air as Pam collapses into the seat.   
  
Jim raises an eyebrow.   
  
“And this arrangement is fair how exactly?”   
  
Pam’s bandanna-ed head, slightly moist with sweat, inclines back against the wing of the cushion, her face screwing up into a pinched mess of contemplation.   
  
“Well… see I alone was tasked with the exhausting feat of gathering paint swatches. And curtain samples. And then I had to make sure that none of the furniture in our new bedroom was going to trip up my Paul Bunyan fiancé every morning on his way out to feed his blue ox. Really, it’s a wonder I put up with such abuse.” She shakes her head sorrowfully.   
  
“Why did you agree to marry me again?” Jim questions, offering his hand to help Pam up, winding their fingers together as they scale the front steps and slip inside the house. “Mark my words, someone better is going to come along in ten years and it’ll be tough luck for Pammy because she married the doofus with the clown feet and inappropriately large nose.”   
  
Leaning against opposite sides of the doorframe of their now empty bedroom, walls primed for warm auburn paint, feet cross-hatched between each other, Pam smiles softly to herself. She shifts forward, using his biceps for leverage and kissing the tip of said inappropriately sized nose.   
  
“I guess I’ll just have to risk it.”   
  
  
  
_i don’t see what anyone can see in anyone else but you_   
  
  
Pam surveys the garage as if it were her kingdom and the art supplies her disciples, tapping a paint brush against the back of one folded arm like a scepter as she nods approvingly. Canvases and a handmade easel and liberally-applied splashes of multi-colored paint.   
  
Drag marks on the dusty, concrete floor speak in a chaotic swirl of motion, frenetic tongues whispering delicate anarchy. It says _life was lived here and it wasn’t wasted_.   
  
“So does this satisfy you, m’lady?” he questions with a comical but underlying smug raise of an eyebrow, leaning casually against the garage door frame. But her lips twitch at his stance and his self-satisfied expression without even turning around because she _knows_ , she just knows, that it’s there. And it’s not just this makeshift studio that he’s so hyped about.   
  
“You have served me well, sir knight.”   
  
Her eyes are twinkling as her gaze finally meets his and she doesn’t even have to say a word for him to receive the message those hazel beacons are sending him. _I love you_.   
  
She faces the easel, imagining the dips and curves and hatch marks winding over the canvas, can almost feel the paint slippery and powerful on the pads of her fingers. This one will say family in circles and crosses and she’ll call it _Halpert with a side of Beesly_.   
  
His hands inch around her waist, his fingers splaying wide like a protective cage over her belly. It’s barely noticeable now, the slight curve to her stomach, but he’s touched her, felt her, warmed her enough that he can tell the difference. He knows her body like a soft-shoed cartographer over his homeland, almost as well as she knows herself, and his hands soothe ovals over her skin. Over the tiny life they made together. He smiles against her shoulder and a part of her feels a bit put out that he’s possibly more excited about this than she is.   
  
She can still hear the pitter-patter of summer rain against their roof as they lay curled like nestled spoons under a single flowered sheet.   
  
_“I hope she has you hair.”  
  
“Why do you say that?”   
  
“Well we can’t afford enough hair straightening products for two.”   
  
A pause drowned in the soft slosh of water.   
  
“She’s going to be beautiful.”   
_  
His arms wrap solid around her, always, and she leans the crown of her head against his shoulder.   
  
_“Just like you.”_   
  
  
  
_i love you more than i could ever promise, and you take me the way i am_  
  
  
“Jim.”   
  
He wrinkles his brow down at the newspaper in his lap, legs stretched out like lazy logs. Worry over basketball stats fuzzies his comprehension; he’s only half paying attention but Pam’s too preoccupied with her own vexation to notice.   
  
“They’re doing it again.”   
  
His eyes dart upwards, taking in her disgruntled expression before stealthily sliding his gaze over to the yard adjacent to theirs, just in time to see their elderly neighbors turning away with a dramatic pose of nonchalance. He rolls his eyes.   
  
“Nosey old coots…”   
  
Pam has half a mind to stand up in outrage. To stalk over there, the thin, crunchy blanket of early autumn leaves adding importance to her steps. To lean over the chain-link fence between their yards on her tip-toes and tell them to mind their own business.   
  
_“We’re going as fast as we can, alright? Floral arrangements don’t order themselves.”_  
  
And it’s true; their little-wedding-that-could is chugging along at a slow but steady pace and she has enough stress about it as it stands without her hawk-eyed neighbors eying her expanding belly in moral distress.   
  
“I feel like putting up something really tacky on our lawn to give them something else to gossip about,” Pam pivots her body in the plastic lounge chair to face him, “Can we put up some really cheap lawn ornaments out front?”   
  
Jim smirks down at the black and white print and his ink-smudged fingertips.   
  
“All the gnomes and pink flamingos your heart desires.”   
  
  
  
_we can't rewind, we're locked in time, but you're still mine_   
  
  
“Now?”   
  
“No, not yet.”   
  
“Now?”   
  
“Just be patient.”   
  
…   
  
“Now?”   
  
“No!”   
  
“Okay, okay, I’ll stop asking… how about n-“   
  
“Pam, I swear to Charlie Chaplin if ask what your surprise is one more time…”   
  
A tiny giggle flits through Pam’s ears from the dark blankness of her vision, Jim’s warm hand pressed solid and damp over her eyes.   
  
“Jordon?”   
  
“Yeah, I’m here mom.”   
  
Pam grumbles a disgruntled string of _alwaysthelasttoknow_ , the braided kinks of the words pressed into the flesh of her cheek and the inner pout of her lips. But then hot breath fans sticky sweet into the meadow valley just behind her ear, prickling up her spine and winding around her vertebrae like honeysuckle vines. She shudders involuntarily and she can feel him smile against her neck. Placing one wet kiss on the juncture between her shoulder blade and the column of her neck, the solid press of his body against her back disappears and his hand drops from her face, the sudden brightness blinding her momentarily.   
  
“Surprise.”   
  
And suddenly she can’t breathe. Even though she wants to. She wants to take in the scent of exposed earth, the blooming wisteria just beginning to twist and twirl up the supports to…   
  
A terrace. Her terrace. The one she’d been picturing all those years ago in a tiny, sunless office in front of a probing camera, its Cyclops lens staring at her crumpling face unerringly, flashing red like it was angry at her for not having all the answers. It seems so long ago; a lifetime.   
  
Her eyes find Jim’s and even though he’s slightly graying just at the temples, even though his wedding ring is beginning to brass with age, even though her heart no longer has to long for him, for a man she _shouldn’tdoesn’tcan’t_ want, in a way it’s like no time has passed at all.   
  
She’s home.   
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Soundtrack:  
> “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes  
> “In My Lady’s House” by Iron & Wine  
> “Giving Up” by Ingrid Michaelson  
> “Anyone Else But You” by The Moldy Peaches  
> “The Way I Am” by Ingrid Michaelson  
> “Do You Remember” by Jack Johnson
> 
> Bonus:  
> “Playing Dead” by Breathe Owl Breathe  
> “I Never” by Rilo Kiley
> 
> I chose the songs for the transitions/inspiration because they’re my favorite romantic songs, simply for their realism. There’s no outlandish declarations or fantasies of perfection, just two people sharing a life together. And that’s what I think makes Jim and Pam so relatable and therefore investable, and what I wrote this based on; a series of quiet moments between people who love each other.


End file.
